Where are the updates?

I must apologise for the lack of updates to both this blog and the website of late but my spare time has been occupied by other projects. Some family history related and one that is not.

On the family history side I have at long last been doing some more research into my Buxton tree, or more specifically if and how I am related to Bernard Buxton the founder of Buxtons Ltd (the chainsaw place – if you are local you’ll understand), which I pass every time I visit the archives in Stafford but have not visited although I Keep thinking about it.

Also on the family history side and also related to Rushton Spencer, I’ve been working on the genealogy of the Parish again, it is slow going at the moment because until I have all of the registers transcribed I have incomplete data to work with.

The other project occupying my time is a website makeover for one of the leading West Midlands based injection moulding companies. Their current website is a bit long in the tooth and in need of an update, also due to the design practices of the time, the SEO (search engine optimisation) is pretty much nonexistent. So my role is to provide them with a greater web presence and improved rankings on the major search engines, if I improve the rankings on Google then improvement will follow on the rest.

In the near future I am also planning to make major alterations to www.rushtonspencer.info, the visual design is not going to change just yet but there is going to be a radical restructuring of the site itself which, unfortunately will result in some major disruption for a few weeks while the search engines update their indexes of the website. If you link to the site using the url – that is http://www.rushtonspencer.info – then you should experience no disruption but, if you link to specific pages then be prepared for the 404 error messages (page not found).

The reasons for the change are two fold one is to make maintenance easier, for example by using a small snippet of php code the copyright information will update itself each year with out me having to change the date and upload the whole of the site. Secondly I want to improve usability by, for example implementing some sever side programming that will highlight the keywords used in a search, to illustrate this if you look at this page you will see that the search terms are highlighted, this is something I wish to implement on my website.

The upshot of which is that I need to change the file extensions from .htm to .php which will of course break all of the incoming links to the site. At the same time to prevent a major disruption again, I will be changing the internal structure of the site so that, for example, instead of having to type http://www.rushtonspencer.info/Pages/HeatonHome.htm to find information relating to Heaton you will only need to type http://www.rushtonspencer.info/heaton to arrive at the same page, this degredation of the urls should again result in an improved user experience.

Don’t worry though I will make an announcement before the changes happen, and I will need to inform some of the websites linking to mine so they can also update their links.